Do you change your voice when you speak English? Here’s why (+ listen to my voice in Hebrew😲)

hey there it's Hadar thank you for joining me and today we are going to talk about why our voice changes when we speak in English so have you ever felt like when you start speaking in English your voice all of a sudden changes it's not your real voice the way you're used to yourself in your native tongue or perhaps you feel like you're lacking the vocal presence in English that you have in your native tongue or maybe you're just exhausted after speaking in English even though that never happens to you in your native tongue or perhaps you have an idea about how English should sound or what is the voice of English and you just don't know how to get there or you're trying to get there but along the way you just feel extremely fake and everything is too tense and stressed and pushed so this is what I'm gonna talk about today in this episode and I'm going to give you some strategies to help you improve and find your own voice in English and start getting comfortable with your voice in English because that is my friend so incredibly important you need to feel like yourself first and foremost and if you stick with us till the end I'm also going to talk to you about the vocal placement of American English and show you how my voice is really different when I speak in English and when I speak in Hebrew which is my native tongue are you ready I'm so excited about this one let's get started now for those of you who already know me you've probably noticed that we have a new guest in this video and that is my new microphone the reason why I brought this microphone is one because for video about voice you want the voice or the sound to be the best so that's the best - I've already recorded this video three times before if this is the fourth time I'm making this video and for the first three times we had some sound issues different sound issues each time so I decided that I'm not taking any chances and I'm bringing on the big guns and three this is a great opportunity to let you know that I got this microphone for my up-and-coming podcast yes I'm launching a new podcast in January of 2020 so make sure you're subscribed to my channel or to my newsletter so you'll find out when that happens okay let me tell you why I'm making this video about voice a few weeks ago I walked out of my school I teach in Tel Aviv as you know I'm not a native English speaker I speak Hebrew and but with my students I only speak in English and as we were walking out I said something in Hebrew I think I was making a joke or I respond to something really quickly and it just came out in Hebrew and my student just looked at me and said I thought it was a different person and I said yes I know my voice in English and my voice in Hebrew are quite different and this triggered a whole conversation about vocal placement but also how we change our voices when we speak a second language and that got me thinking about my experience working with non-native speakers for over 10 years and every time I start helping people get more comfortable with their voice in English it always comes down to their voices our voice is our true expression it's so intimate we are so connected to our voice and if we don't feel comfortable with our voice we simply don't feel comfortable we feel fake we feel like it's someone else and that starts a whole snowball of self-consciousness we start being so judgmental and we don't understand why we're so nervous and uncomfortable now why we change our voices well there are a few reasons for that and I'm gonna talk about that in a sec but you need to know that your voice is a mere reflection of your internal state and usually when we speak English if we feel insecure it's going to come across in your voice unless you become aware of it because when you feel self-conscious when you feel confident when you feel happy when you feel sad when you feel anxious when you feel scared it shows up in your voice the frequencies the vibrations your emotions everything is expressed in your voice and that's a true gift you'll notice that it's a lot easier for you to connect with someone who has an expressive voice someone that you can connect understand what they feel what they think as you listen to their voices it creates trust and the sense of empathy it's called rapport when you have this connection with someone in a conversation and it's not based on verbal communication but nonverbal communication and their voice is a huge part of it and this is why when you change your voice or manipulate your voice in English you don't feel like you can establish this connection and really sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with your vocabulary or grammar or mistakes that you make you just don't feel like yourself in English so I believe that working from the inside out really learning how to connect with your voice in English will significantly help you communicate in English with confidence and with clarity so as we said your voice is an expression of your internal state and I've come to notice that my students who are insecure about their English tend to go way below their optimum pitch level when they speak in English optimum what let me explain optimum pitch level is the ideal vocal placement for your voice so in your optimum pitch level your voice is at a level where you combine all the resonators in your body focal resonators are the areas in your body where your voice resonates your voice is frequencies vibrations and for you to be able to hear something the voice needs to resonate to hit a certain wall of something in container and bounced around for you to hear it think of it like a musical instrument let's think of drums if you have a small drum it's going to have a different sound than a large drum right usually a larger instrument with a larger resonance box will generate a sound that is deeper stronger right versus a small drum or if you think of a guitar like a ukulele where the sound is is thin and usually higher and softer right and the same goes for our vocal resonators so the chest is a vocal resonator and think alike it's very it's relatively big so that's the best place for the voice to resonate because you have a lot of space here but your mouth is also a resonator your nasal cavities your sinuses right all the spaces inside your mouth are resonators the smaller the space is the thinner the voices or the higher the lighter and there is a difference between a voice that resonates in the chest where you can hear and feel those vibrations and when the voice resonates only in the head or the nose right that changes the the that's how we change the vocal placement we just resonate it in different places in the body now I'm going to talk about the vocal placement of English and vocal placements in general in a different video but I just want you to be familiar with those terms so the optimum pitch level is basically an ideal placement where you combine all your vocal resonators now this is the ideal we want to get there it doesn't need to be perfect remember and we always want to observe our voice in relation to that ideal voice now going back to what I said when people feel insecure they tend to go a little lower in pitch than their optimum pitch level so I'm going to show you how that might sound for example right now I'm going below my optimum pitch level you can still hear me but I feel like I really need to force my voice to be heard my voice is a little softer and it rings differently it doesn't have that nice ring that I have when I speak here now this is effortless for me this I don't need to strain anything I didn't need to work hard I feel like my voice is carried through the room and bounces off the walls and I don't have a lot of furniture here yet so you can maybe hear the echo but when I go here my voice doesn't resonate as well and I feel like I'm straining my throat to speak and to be heard and this is something that happens to a lot of the students so if that happens to you I want you to ask yourself why that happens is it a habit do you do it in your native tongue as well and maybe it's because there is something about speaking in English that scares you and in a way you just don't want to be hurt and you hide your voice you stifle your voice you push it down you don't want to be noticed sometimes that's the reason you want to stay in the back and your voice stays in the back - the result you are not being heard your voice is not carrying through you are not expressing your emotions you are not speaking and you feel exhausted after speaking so you feel this is just not for me or you feel like you're not yourself and then you're like English is just not for me no you are doing something that is preventing you from being yourself from feeling comfortable okay so let's try a little something to see if that is the case for you I want you to start by just saying a sentence something like hey it's really nice to meet you just say it hey it's really nice to meet you now don't try to imitate me or my voice or how I say it say it like you'd normally say it if you were to approach someone hey it's really nice to meet you say it again and again now I want you to hum don't think about it don't try to imitate my hum just write to hum close your lips good now hum again and then say the sentence hey it's really nice to meet you do it again hey it's really nice to meet you now I want to ask you when you started your hub and when you're started your sentence did you start on the same note was your voice in the same place or did you do something like this mm hey it's really nice to meet you mm hey it's really nice to meet you because if you did you shifted from your optimum pitch level because your hum if you don't manipulate it and if you don't try to make it sound like someone else's home your initial hum your organic hum without thinking about it is usually your optimum pitch level so it's an indication where your voice is most comfortable at and if this is quite different from the sentence that you said the way where your voice was when you said that sentence then you want to look at this gap and ask yourself why that happens and see if you can do something about it because if you're doing something like mm hey it's really nice to meet you your voice is not in the ideal place and that causes all of the things that we discussed so try to start with a hum again and just from there move on to a word like hey hey man try to be on the same note and from there go to the sentence mmm hey it's really nice to meet you hey it's really nice to meet you now just check in with yourself and see that you're not pushing your voice you're not working too hard you always want to feel like when you speak in English you kind of lean back with a glass of wine or with a cocktail or with club soda and you're just like all good I'm chilling in the Sun okay that's the quality of your voice or that's the quality that you want your voice to have mm hey it's really nice to meet you starting with a hum can help you get there okay now sometimes people go above their optimum pitch level so sometimes you may hear someone doing something like this mm hey it's really nice to meet you okay raise your hand if that's you hey straining your voice pushing your voice pushing it up right using only your your head voice and that's not good for your voice either cuz that kind of tension creates tension in your voice and tension in your voice creates tension in your body and tension in your body creates tension in your heart and you know speaking a second language is stressful enough you don't need extra tension here okay so shake it off start again and if you tend to go higher in pitch then I want you to go back to the hum and do the very same thing here hey hey no bring it down MA hey hey it's really nice to meet you I actually want you to visualize like your voice has a color and you want that color to carry throughout the room MA it's really nice to meet you or hey my name is Hadar don't say Hadar say your name hey my name is so-and-so okay and this is how I want you to start exploring your voice and see if you can play with a placement of your voice now what I'm gonna say might seem a little controversial you know when I say bring it back to your voice it probably means that you need to bring it back to the voice that you use in your native tongue now different languages have different vocal placements and a lot of times people teach you how to find the vocal placement of English and I'm going to talk about that at the end and in another video as well now I want you to remember this before trying to manipulate your voice to fit a certain criterion and to fit the expectation of what your voice in English should sound you need to know that you first need to sound like yourself you first need to get comfortable with who you are in English and to do that it has to go through your own voice even if it doesn't serve English that well it serves you there are enough American voices out there in the world but there is only one you so before trying to get somewhere else understand where you are at right now and only after you get comfortable with speaking English in your own voice and then starting to play with the different resonators and placements I mean it's always great to improve your vocal presence even for native speakers that's when you can start shifting it to where you want to be but then you're in control it doesn't have to you you make it happen right I have changed my voice and I speak differently in English because I gradually found that placement while I was getting comfortable with my own voice so this was not always my voice in English but I got there and now this is my voice my voice I just happen to speak in English it's different than my voice in Hebrew you only hear ok so I'm gonna say the whole thing in Hebrew now and you will see how different that is as of shavon imitability friedrich Mancha the Mori McCall surely be very to Albert on the move my cultural event lit the Cannes in rockland me the birth of a baby Turkish Musa burma-shave Amash Modi schmoozer the little bubble eponymously mark any of Pam no a city a very magical animal hello tiger so as you can see my voice in Hebrew is a lot lower than my voice in English and if I were to switch my voices between the languages it would feel extremely uncomfortable and I would feel like I have to strain my voice to do that can't explain it but as I said I haven't had this vocal placement when I first started speaking in English right my voice was closer to Hebrew but I was able to gradually shift it with exercises with awareness and just by speaking and it feels like English just took over a different place in my in my body and I loved it I loved it and I don't want to change it but I had to go through a bunch of different steps before getting here but do not go and do that before getting familiar with your vocal needs in a way and what serves you best okay that's it I want you to let me know in the comments below what is the one thing that resonated the most with you in this video notice how I use the word resonated in a video about voice after you're done with your comment be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel and come on over to my website to check it out because there's a lot of great stuff waiting for you there for free like in accent crash course or a list of the most mispronounced words in English by non-native speakers and more thank you so much for being here have a beautiful day full of vocal vibrations and I'll see you next week in the next video bye

Channel: Accent's Way English with Hadar

Views: 191,792

Rating: 4.9229088 out of 5

Keywords: find your voice in american english, change your voice, hadar shemesh intonation, pitch in american english, hadar shemesh youtube, hadar shemesh, hadar accent, accents way, hadar english, pitch in english language, pitch in english, Vocal placement, american intonation, english pronunciation, american english pronunciation, hadar in english, hadar english coach, hadar english youtube, english with hadar

Id: qFbjwopad7c

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019